Before the appearance of Covid-19 pornography was already one of the top five major influences on the internet. Absolutely huge!

How big? If you are a chessplayer, then let me make this comparison: in just any random 10-second interval during the day there are more people around the world watching porn than the total number of people who follow, play or spectate chess online during an ENTIRE year!

But since the lockdowns have begun, the online porn industry has seen its viewerships go thru the roof! And not willing to just rest on its laurels, the porn industry is betting real money that will ensure that porn becomes the BIG winner of the pandemic.

Pornhub, the most popular porn site on the internet, has created a number of imaginative advertisement campaigns to attract viewers who are stuck at home and are looking for things to do. If you live in Italy or Spain, for example, you have the right to a free premium membership!

If you are like me, then you are already fed up with annoying tweets, emails and other reminders from sites like Chess24,Chess.Com and FIDE about how wonderful online chess can be while we are stuck at home. One can only take so much Banter-Chess before realizing that you could use your time for better things…

But, hey, they are just trying to take advantage of a good business opportunity. I certainly don’t fault them…after all, nobody can watch porn all day long!

Current World Champion Magnus Carlsen announced just today that he (in cooperation with Chess24, ofcourse) is going to organize an online tournament featuring himself and 7 other top-10 players.

Total prize fund, apparently — though no sponsor was mentioned — a cool 250,000 ding a lings.

It is unfortunate that not more participants are being considered. One would think that one of the advantages of doing things online is the easier access to large numbers of chess players.

Many feel that spectating a small number of players (almost always the same players!) engaged in a seemingly endless number of 15-minute rapid games is about as exciting as repeatedly breaking in half the same banana over and over again…

In any case, it is curious that this announcement is made on the same day as Rex Sinquefield’s traditional ‘Grand Tour’ was cancelled this year and will only reappear in 2021. Is this a coincidence or just a paranoid afterthought?!

So far no talk of Chess24 giving away free premium memberships to those located in particularly hard hit countries by the coronavirus. Award another point to porn for being more business savvy!

But then again, this sort of makes sense. Chess24 — despite being an absolutely fabulous concept — is struggling. According to unsubstantiated rumours, the company has not been making money these past few years.

Ditto most other online chess enterprises. Chess players are notoriously cheap, and the number of visitors is always smallish.

The owners of Chess24 — I suppose — would no doubt like to try to unload the entire enterprise and to recoup their initial investments, but that is now something virtually impossible given the present financial environment provoked by the coronavirus crisis.

Even in the best of circumstances it would have been a hard sell. Some of my older readers might remember the failed KasparovChess.Com enterprise some 20 years ago.

At the time nobody really understood the internet (the so-called dot-com bubble) and so some brave souls invested some 12 million dollars (various figures were quoted in the press of the time, the smallest being 9 million dollars and the largest being 13 million dollars) with the hope of becoming billionaires once an IPO could be rolled out.

Then the dot-com bubble burst; having little or no revenue and a very small readership — even on a good day the site could not break an average of more than 25k viewers — everything soon went south, crashed and burned. All of the investors lost their money. Every penny of the 12 million dollars.

What the Chess24 owners have done differently – and this is quite clever – is to recently:

align itself with Magnus Carlsen

then become partners with an online retailer called Chessable.

then hire fellow Montrealer Pascal Charbonneau, who had worked in a wallstreet company specializing in IPO’s.

No doubt all of this in an effort to make Chess24 look more attractive to any potential investor(s) who might want to buy them out…

On paper this sounds like a really sound and professional business strategy, but even if coronavirus had not happened and the 2020 World Championship match in Dubai at the end of the year would not have been cancelled (this will be announced in coming weeks by FIDE) it is unlikely that any web business with less than a zillion visitors daily would be attractive. Especially a chess site. Magnus or no Magnus.

Coronavirus and Chess.Com

The other big chess site on the internet, Chess.Com, which is reputedly on its way to soon having more members than the entire global human population, is also ramping up its coronavirus activities.

Readers will recall that Chess.Com partnered with Twitch not so long ago, and has cleverly grown a niche that somehow does not come into conflict with Chess24. They also do not offer free premium memberships to Italy or Spain.

Chess.Com also has a 24-7 strategy of around the clock chess activities. I am too old to understand the Twitch appeal, but from what I have heard it seems quite successful.

Saying all of this, I have a hard time trying to get my head around why Chess.Com would put out some self-advertisement in the form of some dubious news article. My point is that this article is penned by a Dan Bernstein.

The EXACT same news article was published on another site the same day (word for word) but this time the name of the author is Lisa Witt.